A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERWINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION''A major book that I suspect will come to be considered among the essential memoirs of this vexing decade'' New York Times Book ReviewIn 1961, Sarah MBroom''s mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant - the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah''s father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children.But after Simon died, six months after Sarah''s birth, the house would become Ivory Mae''s thirteenth and most unruly child.A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom''s The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America''s most mythologized citiesThis is the story of a mother''s struggle against a house''s entropy, an